Vizio’s Co-Star: $99 Google TV box with OnLive gaming support

New box undercuts Sony on price while bringing new features.

Vizio, a company best known for its inexpensive HDTVs, is looking to expand into another new market: it has just announced the Co-Star, a Google TV set-top box that will begin selling in July for $99.99. In addition to the standard complement of video streaming services and Google TV features, this new box will differentiate itself by including support for OnLive's streaming gaming service.

The Co-Star includes support for 1080p video over HDMI, 802.11n wireless, a USB port for storage and peripherals, and a Bluetooth remote has a QWERTY keyboard on its reverse side. In addition to OnLive, it features support for the standard complement of streaming video services including Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and YouTube. Being a Google TV product, it also features a full Flash-enabled Google Chrome browser, and Vizio has also included support for DLNA streaming media servers.

The presence of OnLive on this new box is an interesting choice for the gaming company, since at $99 it matches the price of the company's own OnLive MicroConsole, which doesn't include the browsing and streaming video capabilities offered by Google TV. The MicroConsole does ship with its own gamepad, but this is available separately for $49.99, and it should be compatible with the Co-Star.

This news comes hot on the heels of Sony's next-generation Google TV boxes—the streaming-only NSZ-GS7 and Blu-ray-toting NGZ-GP9—but at $199 and $299 respectively, the Co-Star undercuts them both on price. All of these newer Google TV devices are cheaper than first-generation devices like the Logitech Revue thanks in part to their new ARM processors, but some of Google TV's innate problems (including lack of buy-in from the cable companies) remain.